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An anonymous reader writes "Mozilla's Chris Blizzard talks about the rising competition by Google Chrome, the evolution of the web platform and the prospects for WebM. He also promises that Firefox 4 will be 'one generation ahead' of other browsers in relation to Javascript speed."

Look, I *love* Firefox. I use it pretty much exclusively myself. Nothing can touch add-ons like NoScript, AdBlock, etc. (and most of my add-ons and their associated functionality can't be found on Chrome, Opera, etc.). But if they think that Google, who provides [techcrunch.com] about 85% of Mozilla's total revenue, is going to sit back and let them take the technical lead over Chrome, they're nuts. And speed has always been one of Chrome's few positive qualities over Firefox.

Not only that, but Mozilla can't afford [osnews.com] to license h264. And that already puts them behind on HTML5. I am hoping that either html5 never catches on, the other browsers all agree to an open format (like WebM), or there is some kind of flash-player type add-on made for Firefox to support h264. But without one of those, Firefox is (sadly) already in a rough spot for the next gen.

And I say all that as someone who hates the idea of giving up my Firefox and having to get my browser from an increasingly-evil Google, an already evil Microsoft, or a closed-off Opera. If I wanted evil and closed, I would have bought an iPad, not a netbook.

The browser vendors' fetishistic obsession with Javascript speed is most irritating.

I have mod points but I decided to respond instead... I agree with you, it is irritating especially when the browser's speeds themselves are miserable. Yay great, Chrome loads faster but I have random issues with plugins which affect my work (one of the plugins is disabling me from reading GMail messages) and AdBlock still doesn't work nearly as well as it does on Firefox for the sites I use most often.

I wish Firefox would stop trying to compete in Javascript and go back to one of the biggest reasons they started the project: speed of the browser itself. That means it should open instantaneously and have low overhead--even with the usual plugins installed (AdBlock, NoScript, etc).

That should be modded up. I've about had it with lag and eventual shutdown of FF. After using for a few days with only a few windows open, FF eventually becomes so unresponsive that I've got to restart it. I mean, click a link and it's takes 4-5 seconds for FF to even start to do anything. Pages load fast, but then the cycle starts again. As an early adopter of FF, I'm now considering a switch to Chrome. Ugh.

but one advantage is that if you close a tab, the memory it is consuming is released.

That's the one big reason why I'm still using chrome. As attractive as FF is, some extension or something eats and eats and eats memory, and the only way to reclaim it is via a full restart. With chrome, you just kill the offending tab. I want to continue using FF, but the memory growth is driving me crazy.

I hear the occasional rumor that some upcoming FF release will support chrome-like multiprocess handling, but I'll believe it when I see it.

Also, the magic bar performance is very susceptible to hard drive slow downs (address bar takes forever to suggest history/bookmarks/... when a virus scan is in progress). Time to load might be long, but I only start Firefox once a day, so I don't really care.

Regarding the "awesome bar" (I really like the functionality, but loathe the name), the sqlite database can get fragmented over time. You might want to try this [lifehacker.com] ever now and then. Can make a world of difference, especially with slower computers/disks.

The awesome bar is one of two things I miss after switching to Chrome. Chrome tries to pack too much into the URL dropdown (search history, suggestions, etc) without doing any of it well. For instance on Firefox, I can type Q[tab] and have my comments page up. sl[tab] is slashdot. c[tab] is my bank site. f[tab] is the firehose journal search I use. Just about any site I go to is four keystrokes max counting hitting enter to load the site. On chrome, I have to type sl[right arrow]/[down arrow][right arrow] to get to my comments page. Note that moving the hand between the arrow keys and the main keyboard adds extra effort. If I don't add the/, Chrome lists only list two options: slashdot.org and search google for slashdot.org.

The other thing is Nuke Anything, which I can't find anything like it for Chrome. Useful for removing that floating div blocking the bottom right corner of every slashdot comments page.

Exactly. The main problem I have with Firefox is that by the time I've customized it to my liking, it's unusably slow. What good is all of that extensibility if it kills the main function of the browser?

The focus on Javascript may well be what makes Firefox usable for me again.

Exactly. The main problem I have with Firefox is that by the time I've customized it to my liking, it's unusably slow.

Maybe you should consider a browser that doesn't need to be bogged down to death to be useable. One of the reasons why I use Opera, for example, it's precisely that it does all the stuff I want it to do without me needing to scrape around the web to get extensions that kill it.

However, what one person considers an absolutely needed piece of functionality another will find useless... I find that greasemonkey, and firebug + yslow are invaluable. I don't really get that with Opera... also, Opera has had a few UI annoyances that really irked me in the past... The 10.x versions not so much though... I do have to test in Safari, Opera, Chrome, Firefox and IE6-8 currently, but my main browser for dev at work is Firefox. I use IE at work (because it's friendlier with the firewall), an

I wish Firefox would stop trying to compete in Javascript and go back to one of the biggest reasons they started the project: speed of the browser itself. That means it should open instantaneously and have low overhead--even with the usual plugins installed (AdBlock, NoScript, etc).

Most of the application level behaviour (windows, buttons, menus etc.) *is* written in JS, CSS and XML. Improving the speed of JS (and the DOM / CSS / layout) has a direct impact on the speed of the browser.

Yes, yes, and double yes! Firefox *IS* faster than most other browsers in every part of browser performance that matters *except* Javascript speed. But yeah, browser load time and overhead, as well as initial rendering and scroll-rendering speed are all critical to the browser experience for me.

I have tried Chrome 3 times now and every time I give up on it - mostly because I find scrolling performance on complex HTML pages to be distractingly bad. Firefox does not have this problem - it is zippy and smooth, at least on modern Core 2 Duo or better hardware. I gather that for lower end hardware, Webkit seems to do better.

I know that on the 10% of websites with intensive Javascript code, Chrome will blow the pants off of Firefox right now, but this is not the primary use case of the web for me.

Yes, yes, and double yes! Firefox *IS* faster than most other browsers in every part of browser performance that matters *except* Javascript speed. But yeah, browser load time and overhead, as well as initial rendering and scroll-rendering speed are all critical to the browser experience for me.

I have tried Chrome 3 times now and every time I give up on it - mostly because I find scrolling performance on complex HTML pages to be distractingly bad. Firefox does not have this problem - it is zippy and smooth, at least on modern Core 2 Duo or better hardware. I gather that for lower end hardware, Webkit seems to do better.

I know that on the 10% of websites with intensive Javascript code, Chrome will blow the pants off of Firefox right now, but this is not the primary use case of the web for me.

Agreed. Chrome and Safari have the worst scroll-rendering performance of any browser. Safari is the slower of those two. Even on a lot of Javascript-heavy pages where certain functions are much faster in Chrome, the experience is often better in Firefox if any scrolling is required. Opera excels in rendering/scroll rendering speeds and even IE is refreshingly fast compared to the Webkit browsers. JS speed is okay, but I won't use a fast JS browser that isn't fit to render html.

Firefox is a browser platform which is extremely extensible across a broad range of interfaces, you can touch a lot of things inside the browser.

Extremely extensible - but do we need it? I'm not sure XUL buys us all that much, in common usage, but it certainly slows things down. It would be nice to go back to a small, lightweght, fast browser. I'm sure I've heard that before somewhere...

The trouble is, a small lightweight browser isn't terribly useful for most people...Most people will need additional features, different people will need different features, and you can either build these features in (meaning bloat as there will be features there you never use and its unlikely the default set of features would suit every niche) or you make the base extensible so people can install the extensions they need.

In the old days, JavaScript was interpreted. This means that the JavaScript engine is evaluating the program as it runs, instead of the CPU evaluating the program. This is what the Firefox SpiderMonkey engine does and it is slow.

When Chrome was released and there was a push to make things faster, Mozilla wrote an engine called TraceMonkey. This engine supports tracing jit, which is to say that the engine watches what javascript code gets executed (the tracing part) and uses that to produce optimised code that the CPU will execute (the jit -- or just-in-time compilation -- part).

Chrome's V8 engine, Apple's Nitro engine and others use what is called method jit. This means that the javascript code for a method (function) is compiled to code the CPU can execute when that method is called.

Mozilla are currently working on a similar method jit engine called JaegerMonkey. This engine is taking the nitro assembler (the code that generates the CPU instructions) and writing everything else on top of this. In addition, they are also taking the Yarr! regular expression engine that IIR, Chrome is using to speed up their regular expression handling.

Mozilla are looking to blend the method jit and tracing jit together -- hence the "one generation ahead" comment.

Mozilla are also optimising various javascript calls (a contrived example would be replacing calls to Math.sin with the sin CPU instruction) to provide "fast paths" that speed up code that uses those calls.

Yeah, but if they fixed it, what would we bitch about? Slashdot produces crap HTML and JavaScript to engender sophisticated discussion about web standards and coding practices. Also, the developers are not beaten with enough frequency or severity.

That's because most 'web applications' (such as google docs) or stuff like Facebook is chock full of Javascript.

In ye olde days when java script was just used to pull up a popup or block your right clicks it wasn't so important, but nowadays most popular sites are full of it. Whenever you need 'dynamic' content on a web page - that's Javascript.

I love that browser vendors are obsessed with javascript speed. The bottom line is that rich internet applications that don't use flash depend entirely on javascript being fast. The reason flash even got a foothold was because we had no alternative runtime because most implementations of javascript were abysmal. Javascript is important in html 5, deal with it.

Agreed. I have only one plugin installed (Adblock). But even so, when I Ctrl+Click to open my six daily comic strips in quick succession, it still misses a few of the clicks. I wish it were more responsive.

if they think that Google, who provides about 85% of Mozilla's total revenue, is going to sit back and let them take the technical lead over Chrome, they're nuts.

Except that Google benefits from faster Javascript engines in any browser, not just Chrome. Firefox is a popular browser, and if Firefox can execute Javascript faster, that means that Google's web apps (which I am just going to guess account for more revenue than Chrome) will perform better. It also means that Google could potentially do more, i.e. have heavier Javascript programs, without worrying that people are going to get annoyed at how slow their applications are. How does Google lose here?

if they think that Google, who provides about 85% of Mozilla's total revenue, is going to sit back and let them take the technical lead over Chrome, they're nuts.

Except that Google benefits from faster Javascript engines in any browser, not just Chrome. Firefox is a popular browser, and if Firefox can execute Javascript faster, that means that Google's web apps (which I am just going to guess account for more revenue than Chrome) will perform better. It also means that Google could potentially do more, i.e.

Yea, isn't the whole point behind Chrome that Google needed to improve Javascript speed and browser efficiency? I mean, they certainly aren't making money off it. Gaining information, maybe, but if _that_ was the goal, why open source it? My bet is they finally decided that they'd get more for their money by launching their own browser rather than spending that money on Mozilla. But still, improving browser speed is nothing but good for Google.

Nowhere. But right now it's the most widely adopted and implemented (pretty much everyone but Firefox either does or is planning to support it). Until there is an alternative that all the major browsers support, Firefox is going to continue to lag behind. WebM is promising. But without MS onboard, it's going nowhere.

For what? Actual video content? I don't think so. Would some of us like to see it more popular than, say, Flash to serve up video? Sure. But that's not the way it is now.

To suggest it's the most adopted is wishful thinking.

Except that IE, Chrome, and Safari all support it. Doesn't this mean that it's the most widely adopted and implemented codec supported for use with HTML5? GP didn't say it was the most widely *used* codec, only the most widely *supported*.

Nowhere. But right now it's the most widely adopted and implemented (pretty much everyone but Firefox either does or is planning to support it).

Huh, that's really confusing. Because according to Wikipedia [wikipedia.org], Ogg Theora looks more supported in browsers than H.264. Perhaps you meant that there are more videos online in H.264 than Ogg Theora -- that goes without dispute.

On top of that, IE's H.264 is only implemented so far in a nightly build and not released.

But, come on, big players like Apple and Google have been pushing HTML 5 and if Ogg Theora gets accepted in the HTML 5 spec and H.264 doesn't... well, guess how long people would use IE

Nowhere. But right now it's the most widely adopted and implemented (pretty much everyone but Firefox either does or is planning to support it). Until there is an alternative that all the major browsers support, Firefox is going to continue to lag behind. WebM is promising. But without MS onboard, it's going nowhere.

Really, there are two options:

MS chooses to adopt WebM. This is not unreasonable, especially as it starts to get rolled out more across the web. Part of MS's reluctance is probably due to the novelty of the technology.

MS doesn't ever adopt WebM. In that case, a FOSS plugin to IE will certainly end up being made (probably by Google, a la Chrome Frame [google.com]) that adds WebM support, and any sites that use WebM will direct IE users to that plugin.

Either way, I don't see MS's explicit WebM support as a serious hurdle

Nowhere. But right now it's the most widely adopted and implemented (pretty much everyone but Firefox either does or is planning to support it). Until there is an alternative that all the major browsers support, Firefox is going to continue to lag behind. WebM is promising. But without MS onboard, it's going nowhere.

Really, there are two options:

1. MS chooses to adopt WebM. This is not unreasonable, especially as it starts to get rolled out more across the web. Part of MS's reluctance

Not yet. However, unlike previous HTML specifications, HTML5 is attempting to define which formats are required to be supported by media tags. Microsoft and Apple want it to be H.264. Mozilla says they won't support it leaving the specification at a standstill.

New in version 2.0: Ads are actually BLOCKED FROM DOWNLOADING now, instead of just being removed after the fact!
Note that Chrome doesn't actually support this all the way, so a few resources might still load before AdBlock can get to them, in which case we'll remove those as usual.

Which means that while most content is blocked, some gets loaded -- and any content that gets loaded is great for those who like to aggregate your usage data across multiple sites.

h264 isn't going to be a practical problem for the vast majority of users, since Firefox can just use a system codec (non-Windows-users would have to make sure they have one, of course).

As for JS speed, Mozilla are very ardent in their speed claims, so it's hard not to believe they have something to back it up. It's difficult for users and external testers to figure out exactly how fast they are, despite being open source, because the Moz team is pursuing several parallel tracks to increase JS speed. There'

Just curious, given all these advances in JS speed, are there technical reasons why stuff like Python, Ruby and Perl aren't getting similar improvements in speed?

Not really. They ARE getting major speed improvements (especially Ruby), but there isn't as much money put into it. The techniques used to make JavaScript so fast are finding their way into other VM implementations also.

H.264 will be solved on Firefox with a plugin whether it's official or not.

The real claim I have a problem with is is this "generation ahead" nonsense. How are they magically going to go from a generation behind to a generation ahead? Are they planning to milk a unicorn and pour the results into the codebase? So far each and every Firefox claim of improved javascript has fallen short of the competition.

They weren't a generation behind. I've tried the competition and quite frankly the competition isn't presently as advanced as you're suggesting. Chrome's fast, but it's basically pure spyware and the extensions don't really have anywhere near the reliability or variety of what's available for Firefox. There've been gripes, but as far as I can tell it's mostly just a squeaky wheel minority of trolls that seems to be having huge problems.

It's not just that, since version 3 inclusive Firefox has just got ever slower, ever more buggy and less stable with each release.

If Firefox 4 continues this trend and does not reverse it then it will be the last version of FireFox I use.

Mozilla seems to be a long way away from where they were when they were running campaign after campaign to get people to switch to their browser from IE some years ago, because they really did have a better browser and were simply fighting against the inherent advantage IE

Mozilla doesn't have to license h.264. If you are Windows use the windows codecs. If you are on Mac you use Quicktime. If you are on Linux us the mplayer frame work.There you now have support for h.264.If Mozilla doesn't do that somebody in the EU will just fork it and add it. Or we will get a plug in that will do it unless Mozilla blocks it.So no I am not worried about H.264 support and firefox.I will admit that I have started to use Chrome a lot. It is really fast and I do like it. Firefox is still very g

Nothing can touch add-ons like NoScript, AdBlock, etc. (and most of my add-ons and their associated functionality can't be found on Chrome, Opera, etc.).

Well, as far as I know NoScript hasn't found it's way into the gallery of Chrome's extensions yet...

Don't know about any gallery*, but could I interest you in NotScripts?
http://optimalcycling.com/other-projects/notscripts/ [optimalcycling.com]
* There's a download link pointing to chrome.google.com/extensions/ there so I guess it must be sort of official...

It's certainly nice they are improving the JavaScript engine code - it will lead to less CPU cycles spent on JS intensive pages (most of the stuff published today), but I feel there are other areas as well that should always stay a priority on par or above the JS engine code: startup time and removing cruft that slows this down, possibly having a lightweight firefox "starter" process, so that some important cache is always in memory (i know the OS caches a lot of stuff, but I can't help but notice the delay

There are a few alternatives to yet another plugin:1) You can use standalone SQLite3 installation to open bases and vacuum those.2) Use Python script for vacuuming.3) You can use Error Console with following string to vacuum bases:Components.classes["@mozilla.org/browser/nav-history-service;1"].getService(Components.interfaces.nsPIPlacesDatabase).DBConnection.executeSimpleSQL("VACUUM");I personally prefer last option, beacuse no additional software is required.

The Crap Cleaner app [piriform.com] can vacuum Firefox SQLite databases during its cleanup phase. It also works on Chrome databases too. It also does lots of nice Windows cleanup tasks; makes a nice addition to your standard toolkit.

If Firefox for doesn't have GPU graphics acceleration it will be a generation behind Microsoft Internet Explorer.

All the Javascript speed in the world won't make up for last generation webpage rendering that nails the CPU while the GPU sits idle.

RTFA

Specifically:

derStandard.at: Firefox 4 is going to use hardware acceleration through Direct2D and DirectWrite on Windows, are similar things coming up for Linux and Mac OS X?

Chris Blizzard: Within what's provided: Yes. We're trying to give the best experience possible on each platform. So for Windows Vista and 7 we see huge improvements when doing certain graphically intensive stuff. On OS X for example we have support for OpenGL for doing compositing, on Linux we do the same. But generally the Windows APIs that we have are better and more rich than what we have on other platforms. To give you an example: On Linux Cairo and Pixman were supposed to be fast, but unfortunately the underlying infrastructure never really got fast. On OS X we are actually pretty fast but Direct2D gives the performance advantage to Windows at the moment.

Indeed, after enabling the Direct2D stuff [basschouten.com] in the current Firefox nightly, MS's Psychedelic demo [microsoft.com] runs nice and zippy, slightly faster than on IE9 but without sound. (Without the configs set, it runs nice and not-so-zippy: 162, versus 1774 on zippy mode,* for the color wheel on mine.)

So yeah, render speed won't be a problem for FF, especially if they iron out remaining bugs and move the settings out of The Config Page That Might Void Your Warranty.

If they use platform specific APIs to accelerate stuff, WHY THE HELL don't they use platform specific APIs for rendering video? They don't have to pay MPEG-LA anything since Apple and Microsoft are doing it for them (and everyone else that uses their OS wide media frameworks). If they want WebM capabilities, just make a plugin for the frameworks.

Javascript is okay. Cappuccino has shown us you can have a full desktop-class GUI toolkit implemented in Javascript. The question to me is why does the browser not allow Javascript to access lower level system resources (such as drawing routines) so that one does not need to implement those systems on top of HTML and CSS? Granted, browsers should implement byte code interpreters, not just Javascript interpreters.

That's the old-school definition of "hacking", and it's what nerds DO. Hell, when I was in high school I'd hack cheap $10 transistor radios into guitar fuzzboxes and sell them to friends for $50, because real guitar fuzzboxes cost four times that much back then.

Millions of developer hours have been wasted in inefficiency and hair-pulling because we're still trying shove a square peg into a round hole.

Fast JavaScript is necessary to move the web forward to advanced, desktop-like web apps. Also, Firefox uses less memory than Chrome, due to Chrome's one process per tab model. The reason people go to Chrome, IMHO, is the minimal interface and fast JavaScript.